The Internet has become a valuable resource for organizations, particularly for the research needs of the organization's members. It is a common practice for members of an organization to search information networks, such as the Internet, for information using commercially available search engines. Unfortunately, these searches may result in at least as many irrelevant results as relevant ones. Also, a multi-member organization has a need for quickly disseminating the information gleaned from this research among its members. Conventionally, these results are shared by sending email links to other members of the organization or by saving the resultant documents in a common repository. Presently, there exists no method for either noting which results of an Internet search are relevant to the organization or for capturing relevant results along with the queries for other members' use; resultantly, multiple members of an organization may repeatedly search for the same information in the same information networks. Often, these duplicate searches will not have the same results, and even if they do, unnecessary duplication of an acceptable prior search wastes the time and effort of the secondary searcher. Additionally, there exists a threat that if two or more searchers do not arrive at the same result, at least one searcher will have arrived at an incorrect finding. It should also be noted that with current methods of searching, multiple members of the organization must be trained in the art of searching.
Some have attempted to solve these problems on a larger scale than a single organization, as seen in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,321,228, 6,314,420, and 6,253,208. The '228 patent discloses a collections database that includes “records that other users deem relevant to a search topic and that are selected from result sets derived with earlier search queries.” See Abstract. The '420 patent discloses a “collaborative/content-based filter to make continuing searches for information entities which match existing wire queries and are ranked and stored over time in user-accessible, system wires corresponding to the respective queries,” as well as a “user feedback system [that] provides collaborative feedback data.” The '208 patent discloses an “information access system [that] is provided to create and maintain a rapidly accessible index to information extracted from information sources accessible over the Internet.”
The conventional attempts to address the needs to share research suffer from numerous drawbacks. Since multiple duplicative searches are performed, they require substantially more bandwidth than is necessary. Also, both the user interfaces and the back-end processing systems are relatively inflexible.